Trends in Health Communication

Abstract

According to the US-American Center of Disease Control and Prevention, Health Communication is ‘‘[t]he study and use of communication strategies to inform and influence decisions that enhance health.’’ (Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 2011). In the preface of his book ‘‘Health Communication’’ Richard K. Thomas points out that ‘‘many of the challenges facing healthcare today, in fact, reflect failures in communication’’ (Thomas, 2006, p. V). These citations underline two important aspects of health communication, the wide-ranging scope of the field and its importance. I believe that the articles chosen for this Special Issue on Health Communication of the Journal of Media Psychology reflect both features. The studies presented in this issue certainly demonstrate the diversity of theoretical and empirical approaches and, in some cases, also reflect newer trends. For example, there is a constant expansion of social media services the new features and potentials of which should be taken into account in health communication research. This is especially true for studies that aim explicitly at exploring idiosyncratic potentials of new media for communicating health messages. Not only do the media forms develop – also the messages and health topics change over the course of time, depending on what is perceived as acute health issues in society at any given point in time. The media forms explored in this issue range from video games (two articles) and television to info-websites, web clips, and postings on social media sites. The health issues touched upon are knowledge about hospital admission and the usage of safety gear (such as helmets and safety belts), general health (knowledge), and aspects such as ‘‘sexting’’, flu vaccination and obesity. Here are the short summaries of the six articles that were included in this issue: In the article ‘‘Ceiling Effect in Cultivation’’ Hetsroni investigates the presence of a cultivation effect for hospital-related beliefs triggered by TV consumption. In particular he looks into whether such a cultivation effect would be more influenced by the total time of the respective media exposure (TV viewing time) or rather by genre-specific exposure (time watching medical dramas on TV). The hospital-related beliefs that might be subjected to cultivation effects and that he investigates are beliefs regarding assumed morbidity rates in hospitals, frequency of diagnosis of injury and poisoning (as compared with less sensational, common illnesses) and the ratio of inpatients older than 65 years. His results show that for some of the items he investigated, the total viewing time was significantly linked to the cultivation effects for some of the items, however viewing time of medial dramas was not associated with ‘‘cultivated’’ responses. The lack of finding a genre-specific viewing effect underlines previous assumptions that cultivation does not happen through a specific part of the media program but through media exposure in general. Furthermore the author argues that ceiling effects can prevent detection of potential cultivation process in such studies for items whose distribution are prone to such an effect. In ‘‘Depictions of Injuries and Safety’’ Karazsia and Muller present a content analysis of the most popular 650 video games (across 13 video games genres) looking into 1) the frequency of injuries events encountered by the characters that are controlled by the player, and 2) the presence of appropriate safety gear utilization in the games for the characters. Results show that most games lack the portrayal of safety devices (such as helmets, safety belts) that would have been appropriate for the situation at hand (e.g., the character is driving a vehicle). Furthermore the content analysis revealed that when injuries occurred to the character, he or she only used the appropriate safety gear in 21– 40% of the cases, varying according to the game genre. The authors argue that the lack of safety gear portrayal in popular video games might influence the attitudes and beliefs about the need of safety devices in the players through a cultivation effect. According to their view, video game developers might have a chance to promote a culture of safety by depicting respective devices in future video games, possibly contributing to a decline of real life injuries in young people that are due to the lack of safety gear. In their article ‘‘The Concept of eHealth Literacy and Its Measurement – German Translation of the eHEALS’’, the authors Soellner, Huber, and Reder evaluate the German translation of the ‘‘eHEALTH Literacy Scale’’. The eHealth Scale was developed in Canada to measure the self-indicated competence to find, understand, and apply health information from electronic sources. Stefan Huber has